Two recent volumes of cuneiform texts are resulting in headaches for CDLI. CUSAS 16 by Steven Garfinkle, Herbert Sauren and Marc Van De Mieroop comprises an edition of the Columbia University Library collection with its very welcome set of collated transliterations, but the authors unfortunately did not prepare a full text concordance for the publication, in particular of Robert Lau, Old Babylonian Temple Records (=Columbia University Oriental Studies 3; New York 1906, reprinted 1966), even though this historically interesting volume contained often detailed catalogue and transliteration content on the texts, and was the basis for their inclusion in both Manuel Molina’s BDTNS and in the CDLI. Based on OTR, ABTR and two smaller publications, CDLI (as BDTNS) has 279 entries for Ur III CUL texts that must be lined up with this new publication prior to the entry of its catalogue to our own. Thus, just looking through the 1906 catalogue, OTR42 is apparently CUSAS 16, no. 125; OTR199 appears to be CUSAS 16, no. 121; etc., but, given the time involved in tracing catalogue data through the copies and transliterations offered in CUSAS 16, a singularly unrewarding job in the post-publication stage, it is unlikely that the work will be done. As a consequence, Lau’s catalogue and annotation efforts are likely to eventually disappear from our increasingly electronic records. Only the 61 OTR tablets that included hand copies were cross-referenced in the volume, and the 1906 copies were republished together with those of the remainder of the CUL texts left in the US many years ago by the co-author H. Sauren.

It remains, moreover, a mystery what aside from collations noted in transliterations but not noted in the hand copies, the purpose can be in the (re)publication of this large set of dated hand copies, already used by B. Jagersma and R. de Maaijer to produce CUL tablet transliterations freely available through BDTNS, together with their hand copies through CDLI, and the same use of legacy hand copies has happened in a second recent volume, YOS 15. Uncollated copies by A. Goetze in this latter book will compete for specialist attention against those of the same texts that have been produced by leading specialists, for instance in the case of publications by M. Sigrist, or D. I. Owen. Fair enough; this is presumably a sort of posthumous Festschrift, or a clearing of someone’s desk, but then after many decades in waiting—publication permission for a number of small collections seems also granted to Yale Press from the beyond—the accurate reporting of the physical whereabouts of the published texts, as well as cross-references of legacy research to more recent publications are the more vital. Beyond contacting collection managers to verify reported holdings, there are many resources now available to do this for those who do not have the inclination, or the files to themselves check for previous publications. In the case of collection verification, we have some cause for concern. To take one example, texts 159, 200 and 205 are reported p. 73, with acknowledgement p. x, to be at Hunter College, NY. However following a time-consuming and ultimately unsuccessful correspondence with Julio L. Hernandez-Delgado, Head, Archives & Special Collections, Hunter College Libraries, then with Stephen Kowalik, Head of Hunter’s Judith and Stanley Zabar Art Library, and finally with Professors Green and Koehl of the Department of Classical and Oriental Studies, I have given up the chase after these three tablets that are in clear need of collation and imaging. Who then did the editors of YOS 15 speak to at Hunter about these texts? Or is there another Hunter College in New York State that we are not aware of? Of course this need not be the failing of the editors of disparate cuneiform collections, where particularly in colleges and their various libraries such unusual artifact collections can be difficult to find. But to avoid potential problems in locating a published artifact is precisely why catalogues need to be meticulous—and open to inspection and corrections by experts—and where tablets from legacy work can no longer be found at the time of publication, this fact should be noted, sparing others from wasting their own time in the search. In the case of referencing earlier editions of texts published in the volume, no one has withheld relevant resources from the editors of YOS 15, which would have constituted the only justification I can see for the unprofessional bibliographical work that went in to it, if justification were sought. If a text is reported to be in a Saint Louis collection, then simply search for Saint Louis in one of the online catalogues, and check what you find against texts you propose to publish; these are after all not British Museum numbers of texts. Where hand copies or photos of tablets without further bibliographical data are prepared for publication, it is, similarly, a quick matter for the Assyriologist to simply check some section of the texts’ transliterations against those offered online. You need not even be a registered user of BDTNS to search for the combination “ca3-gal cidim-e-ne” (using that site’s “c” for “š”) in line 2 of YOS 15, 206, where the user will see that this text is entered as D. I. Owen, MVN 15,
107. Collaborators of research efforts to gather and make available primary cuneiform sources for cuneiform studies, for related disciplines and for the global community of informal learners are, unfortunately and unnecessarily, stymied by this lack of publication care, leaving us to do the work of others in cleaning up defective or incomplete catalogues; outsiders like ourselves, however, must work without access to internal resources, for instance the letters and notes of Goetze, that will have been available to those participating in a collective publication.

CUSAS 16’s failings will not be repaired in the near future, if ever, but some of those of YOS 15 can be removed, at least for texts from epigraphic periods marked by online collaborations, that is, now nearly all periods of the late 4th and of the 3rd millennium BC, but, with the exception of the Old Assyrian corpus now in CDLI, the Hittite texts in the Hethitologie Portal Mainz and growing data sets in the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, relatively little from later periods. We of course cannot include in these resources those internal files held back from public view, but apparently not consulted in this publication by Yale editorial staff. One might wonder why even Yale’s own catalogue publication of 21 of the YOS 15 entries in CBCY 2 and 4 was not cross-referenced in the concordances, where in the 1990’s Yale curators expended some effort in compiling, with public funding, a full electronic catalogue of their holdings that is being exported and published piecemeal in paper volumes, however with the full electronic catalogue itself jealously guarded from public access among others under the claim that it constitutes Yale University intellectual property. Below is a list of those entries to YOS 15 that were available for research prior to its appearance, including some 60 texts noted by the editors, above all 33 from the former collection of the Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, Rochester, New York, published in more reliable form by M. Sigrist in 1991, and sold at auction in 2003; with the kind collaboration of M. Molina, I was able to identify, using online tools available to anyone, anywhere, two dozen more texts as having already been published, or distributed through persistent online websites. Where photos and catalogue data of otherwise unpublished texts are freely available online, and, as we at CDLI have tried to make abundantly clear, permanently archived, they should be noted somewhere in text editions that they silently support; such references are set here in brackets. With my own, and the limited current online coverage of 2nd and 1st millennium texts, I cannot speak to the accuracy of their respective catalogue entries in YOS 15.